Technology helping more baby-boomer grandparents stay plugged in to grandkids

Linda
Drake, shown at home in Denver with her dog Beto, uses her laptop to
have a video call with her granddaughter Colleen Drake, 12, who lives in
Arlington, Va. Drake texts regularly with her six grandchildren, who
are ages 10 to 15. (Dustin Bradford/For The Washington Post)

By Nora Krug October 31, 2014

Washington Post Live

Like
a lot of grandmothers, Sheri Williams doesn’t get to visit her
grandchildren as often as she’d like. In part, that’s because she has a
full-time job and nine grandchildren spread across several time zones.
The youngest one lives in Arlington, Va.; the oldest lives in Hawaii. “I
can’t just drive down the street,” she says.

Instead, Williams, a
63-year-old medical administrator in Springfield, Ill., relies on
technology to get a virtual dose of kisses, hugs and updates. She checks
Facebook for the latest photos and family news, and shares milestones
(and endures tantrums) with her 14-month-old grandson in Arlington, via
Skype. For her, the interaction is almost as good as it is in person. “I
get to say, ‘Hey, buddy,’ and see him break out in a smile,” she says.

Although
most grandparents still communicate with their grandchildren by phone,
evidence suggests that a growing number of them — baby boomers,
especially — are turning to online tools to connect. Given the
constraints of distance and time — a majority of boomer grandparents are
still working and many of them live hundreds of miles from their
grandchildren — technology is often the only way to stay connected to
family, and they are increasingly comfortable using it.

Sure,
most people are using more technology these days. But grandparents have a
special incentive to adapt to technology, says Amy Goyer, a family
expert at AARP, because they want to “stay in touch with their
families.” Arecent survey by the organization showed that 20 percent of
grandparents interviewed used technology to communicate with their
grandchildren at least once a week.

A 2012 MetLife report found
that almost one-third of grandparents e-mail with their grandchildren,
and almost a quarter communicate via Facebook.The Pew Research Center’s
Internet & American Life Project found that in 2014, 65 percent of
adults ages 50 to 64 use social-networking sites, up from about 24
percent in 2009.

“Staying in touch with family members is one of
the main motivations for using social media,” says Mary Madden, a senior
researcher at Pew, “and that’s especially true for adults aged 50 to
64.”

Another reason for increased tech use among older Americans
is that many of them become grandparents when they are relatively young —
about 50. Also, about two-thirds of boomer grandparents are still in
the workforce, said Wendy D. Manning, director of the Center for Family
and Demographic Research at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

That
may make them more familiar with technology than the grandparents of a
generation or two ago. Bill Ferris, 69, a professor of management at
Western New England University in Springfield, Mass., says he started
using Skype about four years ago when he taught a class from London. He
then began video chatting with his grandchildren, who live in Chicago
and South Hadley, Mass. “It’s more fun than the phone,” says Ferris, who
also uses video technology to talk to his 85-year-old mother-in-law,
who lives in Belize, and his 95-year-old father, who lives in another
part of Massachusetts.

Linda Drake, 60, was a social worker in
Denver when she first started texting. “It was a valuable tool” to stay
in touch with teenagers she was working with on the job, she says, “and
it made me seem cooler.” When she retired four years ago, she was glad
to have her smartphone. Teenagers don’t like to talk on the phone or
e-mail, but they do text.

Drake now texts regularly with her six
grandchildren, who range in age from 10 to 15 and are scattered from
Virginia to Colorado. She also uses Instagram — sharing photos of her
dog, vacations and other activities — which she likes because it allows
her to stay close to her grandchildren without seeming intrusive.

When
using the app, she says, “I use the name Denverdogz, not Grandmalinda.”
When her 15-year-old grandson posted a picture of himself hugging a
girl, “I may have ‘liked’ it,” she says, but she knew better than to
leave a comment. Instagram is a better way to communicate as her
grandchildren get older, she notes. “I want [them] to know that I love
them, and I want them to know a little about me,” she says. Expressing
this in person is challenging not only because of distance and work
schedules, but because of the gap that develops as the kids grow older.
Teenagers are more likely to respond to a text from Grandma than talk to
her on the phone.

“The immediacy of texting and Instagram, and
the way that each of us feels from those fleeting interactions, keeps
the relationship more vibrant,” Drake says. Her 12-year-old
granddaughter, Colleen, who lives Arlington, showed her how to download
emoticons, “which I love,” Drake says. Now “Colleen and I will go back
and forth with emoticons” — smiles, applause, winks. Colleen says she
loves texting with her grandmother. “It’s fun because I don’t get to see
her much,” she says. She likes telling her grandmother about meals she
has eaten or asking her for help with a family recipe via Facetime.

Communicating
by Facetime is “so easy and so pleasant, ” says Elizabeth Amin, 69, a
retired radiologist in Louisville who uses the app to visit with her
toddler granddaughter in Washington, D.C. — “and I’m not a techie by any
stretch of the imagination.”

Amin says video chatting has
strengthened her connection with her granddaughter, whom she sees in
person just a few times a year. “I say, ‘Give me a kiss,’ and she will
come toward the phone or iPad and will kiss that instead,” she says. “I
don’t know what her little brain tells her,” Amin says, “but she knows
us in whatever form we are.”

Indeed, says Mary-Leslie Holland, a
66-year-old grandmother of five who works at a university lab in Upstate
New York, “it’s so nice for the little kids to see us on-screen so they
sort of know who we are when we show up instead of thinking, ‘Who is
this very old lady?’ ” Holland, whose grandchildren live in Boston and
suburban Maryland., laughs about the time, eager for feedback on a new
haircut, she took a selfie, and with the help of her stylist, put it on
Facebook awaiting her family’s response: “They liked it!”

Still,
many boomer grandparents concede that technology is no substitute for
actually being there. Drake says that her fondest memory of this past
summer was decidedly low-tech: “Laughing uproariously at the dining room
table, for over an hour, playing a card game.”

Which is another
issue many boomer grandparents bring up: Technology may be helping to
improve relationships made difficult by challenges of time and distance,
but it is also something of a tease. As nice as it is to see her
grandson smiling at her onscreen, Williams says, “It breaks my heart.
You don’t get to sit there and hold him.”

Other boomers,
especially those who still work, say they’ve had enough screen time on
the job and just want to talk face-to-face. “Technology has become
necessary and very important for the type of work I do,” says Joan
Teemer, 63, a book sales representative based in Ohio. But when it comes
to spending time with her seven grandchildren, she says, “it is nice to
put it away and breathe.”

Some also say that even as they enjoy
the benefits of being able to “see” their grandkids online, they are
wistful for the days of care packages and handwritten letters. It used
to be that at the end of one’s life you suddenly had this great stash of
letters your mother saved,” Holland says. “That will be no more.”

There’s
also the matter of the third party in this triangle: the child’s
parents. Typically, they are the ones setting up the iPad for their kids
or parents. Some parents may be too busy or simply unwilling — after
all, even Grandma on screen is yet another thing on screen.

More
often, though, families increasingly consider technology — video
chatting especially — a savior. It allows them to share moments — first
steps, first words, art projects, gymnastics routines, new outfits and
haircuts — without the expense and time involved with doing it in
person. (“I’m sure there are lip marks on [my son’s] iPhone,” Amin
says.) Some parents even use grandparents as on-screen babysitters,
entertaining the kids on a tablet while Mom or Dad is making dinner.

Technology,
Drake says, helps keep “those wonderful connected feelings alive
between generations, when our immediate and individual foci are
elsewhere and are admittedly out of sync.” It helps us “remember that we
remain connected.”